When writing a new tool for the WebSphere CloudBurst samples gallery last week, I got the chance to use an API in the CLI that was new to me. Specifically, I got a chance to use the WebSphere CloudBurst CLI in order to retrieve an audit log from the appliance for a specified date period. In case this is new and interesting to you, I thought I would share what I found.

First off, let's take a look at the API I am talking about. It's pretty simple: cloudburst.audit.get(file, start, end). Here, start is the start date for the audit entries and (naturally) end is the end date for those entries. The file parameter simply denotes the location or file object you want to use to store the audit archive retrieved via the get method.

This is a simple enough API. The only wrinkle comes in dealing with calculating the start and end dates. According to the WebSphere CloudBurst Information Center, both the start and end times are 'specified as the number of seconds since midnight, January 1, 1970 UTC. Floating point values can be specified to indicate fractional seconds.' For my use case, I wanted to let a user or calling program pass the start and end times as arguments to the CLI script that retrieves the audit archive. Check out the relevant portion of my script below:

As you can see, the script takes in the start and end time in the MM/dd/yy HH:mm format (i.e. 05/20/10 15:30). It parses the value to produce a date, gets the long value of the date (which is in milliseconds according to the java.util.Date API), and divides that value by 1000. This is to account for the fact that the cloudburst.audit.get method expects you to express the start and end times in seconds. The script passes the converted dates along with the output file location to the get method. The result is a ZIP file that contains an appliance audit, license audit, and PVU audit file for the specified date range.

One of my favorite things about the WebSphere CloudBurst CLI is that it is Jython-based. This means I can leverage Java APIs from my CLI scripts, and that is huge for me because of my existing knowledge of the Java language. You certainly can substitute Python APIs for my use of Java APIs to handle the start and end date calculation. I hope this is helpful, and good luck with the WebSphere CloudBurst CLI!